Mountains are a big thing in the movie, like Pits Paloo (as transcribed), which prompts the question of whether this is Tarantino's Apex Mountain.
Asked by name to define the category, the host first jokes about having broken his foot the day before and his new cast, then explains that Apex Mountain means a person at the peak of their powers both commercially and artistically. — Chris Ryan
One host says this cannot be Tarantino's Apex Mountain: he won the screenplay Oscar at about 29 after Pulp Fiction, was the toast of Hollywood, could have done anything and made Jackie Brown; whether this is his best movie is a different question.
Tarantino has three phases: Dogs, Fiction and Brown as Elmore Leonard underworld movies; Kill Bill and Grindhouse as martial-arts exploitation raised to an art-house level; and Basterds, Django, Hateful Eight and Hollywood as alternate history heavily influenced by Westerns. A host has a sentimental attachment to phase one, which taught him pop culture, likes phase two less, and finds it remarkable that in 2019 people still turn out for two-and-a-half-hour talky films like the roadshow Hateful Eight.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a TBD, possibly a phase four or a continuation or throwback. Asked by name for a big Tarantino conversation, the host says she loves Tarantino, that this is her favorite Tarantino movie, that she really loves Django and Pulp Fiction, and that this is the one she thinks about, craves and enjoys the most. — Mallory Rubin
It might be Apex Mountain for Pitt: shouted out as the last half century's most beautiful person, a very weird guy with extraordinary taste who works with interesting people and never gets credit, the character actor trapped in a leading man's body; the run-up is Ocean's 13, The Assassination of Jesse James, Burn After Reading, Benjamin Button and this in a row, all different performances for great directors in movies that cannot happen without him.
Not all were hits, Jesse James was famously a bomb though remembered by some as maybe the best movie of the century; afterward he does The Tree of Life, Moneyball, World War Z, Killing Them Softly, 12 Years a Slave and The Counselor and produces good work, but this period feels like the most significant of his career since his 90s breakthrough.
The hosts are split on Tarantino, one no, one arguably yes and a third no, prompting the joke that nobody understands Apex Mountain; Pitt, Waltz, Kruger and Laurent are all yes, and B.J. Novak is a no because The Office is his apex, when the residuals hit.
Leonardo DiCaprio was supposed to play Hans Landa, which would have meant doing the movie in English since he could not have learned German and French in time, though the joke is that a guy who slept in a carved-out bear might have taught himself.
Michael Fassbender tried out for Landa a couple of times and was heartbroken, then got the call that he had Hickox at the expense of Simon Pegg, who chose Tintin instead, a sliding-doors moment the hosts call very tough since they love Pegg.
Adam Sandler was rumored to play the Bear Jew and would have nailed the Teddy Williams thing; Nastasha Kinski (as transcribed) was initially going to play Bridget but turned it down, so Kruger got the role, and Kinski, 10 or 15 years older, would have been more a Marlene Dietrich aging starlet; Kruger is so good in the movie.
This is a generation of actors who grew up on Tarantino: Fassbender and friends put on a stage version of Reservoir Dogs in Dublin, and Simon Pegg sat alone in a hotel room anguished over choosing between Spielberg's obvious blockbuster and Tarantino's World War II movie.
Tarantino struggled over casting Melanie Laurent because he thought she was too famous and wanted to discover someone new; she insisted she was not famous and convinced him.
Tarantino met Pitt at Chateau Miraval, where Pitt lived with Angelina Jolie, and they discussed Aldo over a night and five bottles of the estate's own Pink Floyd rose before he accepted, so the rose was a critical factor.
This was the first time Tarantino worked with an in-his-prime movie star rather than rediscovering an underappreciated asset, and everything since, Django, Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, has used stars in their sweet spot, so it may have been more of a risk for Tarantino than for Pitt; complicating things, the Weinstein Company produced and distributed the film, and Pitt, who had refused to work with Weinstein for years over Gwyneth Paltrow, did so because he wanted to work with Tarantino.
Possibly half-assed research rather than a casting what-if: an early iteration when Tarantino first conceived the project was rumored to include Sylvester Stallone as Aldo, Bruce Willis as Donnie Donowitz and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hugo Stiglitz, which would make sense for a late-90s script.
Earlier, during the tavern discussion, Fassbender is said to have tried out for Landa five times, and a host wants to discuss in Casting What-Ifs how both careers would have gone with him as Landa.
The World War II French Resistance atmosphere; Waltz's performance; the writing; the Morricone-sourced music; the 'what do you hear?' exposition device; the nods to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; the actors switching between languages
The World War II French Resistance vibe: taverns, leather jackets, Melanie Laurent's high-waisted wide-legged pants with a cool sweater; a host loves Alan First (as transcribed) novels and the literature and film of the era, calling it capital-R romantic even if it was not as cool as the books make it seem, with no cell phones or Twitter.
A run of jokes about the Bear Jew building his brand without social media, going viral and having a jamming clout score, and a staff presentation on clout; then the list: World War II France and the Resistance atmosphere, Waltz's performance, the writing, which is timeless, and the music, timeless because it is largely from past Morricone soundtracks.
The 'what do you hear?' exposition technique, normally disliked, is seamless and effective here, letting the questioned character explain identity and purpose; it happens multiple times early in the movie, and spies always need to be asking for information.
Two homages to forthcoming work: Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France, the film's original title, is chapter one, and Pitt's one attempt at another persona is the Italian stuntman Enzo Gorlami, while he plays a stuntman in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; nobody goes up his own ass more than Tarantino, who has a shared universe without making a big deal of it.
The way the actors switch flawlessly between German, French, Italian and English, or intentionally fail to, has aged the best for one host.
This is called one of the hardest picks the show has had: the movie is essentially five 20-to-30-minute scenes and holds three of a host's favorite scenes of the century. The nominees read out are the La Louisiane tavern with Fassbender, Kruger and Hellstrom; Landa at the dairy farm, the opening 20 minutes; Hickox meeting Fennec (as transcribed) and Churchill; Shoshana's strudel lunch with Goebbels and Landa, specifically her stifled cry when Landa leaves; and the Cat People scene of her putting on the makeup and the dress. Little Aldo is on the list, though his speech could be.
The introduction of the Bear Jew has to be on the list: Aldo's conversation with the German soldier, the bat knocking in the tunnel, the needle drop as Donnie Donowitz emerges, and the high laughter at the Boston accent, which is Eli Roth doing a Ted Williams impression; the hosts chant the Teddy ballgame and Lansdowne Street lines.
Other nominees: the forehead-carving reveal in that sequence, the Bear Jew's first kill, the Stiglitz killing-spree montage with its heavy metal riff and Samuel L. Jackson voiceover, the Hans flip at the end with Aldo's bluffing and pursuit of vengeance and the 'just a chewing out' moment, the theater carnage, and the Gorlami scene introducing the three Italian compatriots to Landa with their Godfather hands, which lets the audience laugh after the weighty historical material.
The tavern scene is a host's favorite part along with the opening 20 minutes: essentially Tarantino making a Hitchcock movie, like Rope, one of the great bar scenes, with two thirds of it spent on the heads-up card game; a joke asks whether people in the 40s were smarter, and the answer is that it is a Tarantino invention in which every character is clever.
Hellstrom's King Kong theory is Tarantino's own, shared with Terry Gross on Fresh Air; the tension builds when the unseen Hellstrom stands up with his boot of beer, and the scene is a comedy of manners about how long they have to stay, a literal card game in which each side ups the ante until pistols are pointed at testicles, capped by the hand gesture for the scotches.
Fassbender's performance is called crazy: a man born in Germany, raised speaking German, moved to Ireland and learned English, playing an Englishman who learned German and affects an invented Pitzpaloo-esque (as transcribed) accent; he tried out for Landa five times and was heartbroken before being given Hickox, and this was the moment a host asked who that movie star was, after Hunger had made him look like the next Daniel Day Lewis (transcribed 'Dale and Dale Lewis'), with this suggesting the next James Bond.
Hickox talks like Trevor Howard and looks like Sean Connery, the smartest and most dashing man in the room but also a pretentious film critic who appreciates a good scotch; alcohol is deployed throughout the scene, from the boot of beer and the soldiers' schnapps for Maximilian's birth to the champagne and the scotch that gives the Englishman away.
The 'speaking the kings' line is a line a screenwriter waits his whole life for; Fassbender's affectation and manner change the second he does the hand, knowing it is over, and Hellstrom knows too, which is the point of the line that neither of them is getting out of the bar.
August Diehl as Dieter Hellstrom, called the most evil Nazi name ever heard, gives a hell of a performance going nose to nose with Fassbender; Bridget von Hammerschmark's (as transcribed) overconfidence in insisting they stay, when the soldiers knew before going downstairs that a meeting in a basement was insane, raises the question of whether the scene wants the audience to doubt her loyalty.
The answer offered is that the scene hammers home that these people had jobs before the war, a film critic and an actress rather than trained soldiers, so she might simply pick a bar whose bartender she knows; her operating-table line that it was either a trap or a terrible coincidence but not both reflects what probably happened thousands of times in the war.
The ticking-clock tension of the tavern is Hitchcockian, but it may not beat the opening 20 minutes: the lights go down, the Morricone music and the odd title fonts start, and the film opens like a spaghetti Western, building and building as someone comes up the road, with Lea Seydoux there, before a 20-minute conversation between the dairy farmer and Hans Landa that announces Waltz as an actor nobody had seen before.
The opening shot is almost exactly the opening shot of Unforgiven and the setup of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, both huge movies for Tarantino; the Morricone score is from The Big Gun Down and the opening signature (transcribed as 'Fira Lys') is Beethoven, the great Germanic composer arriving in a small village just like Landa. The sequence then becomes a Sherlock Holmes movie bookended by Westerns, with Shoshana running toward the horizon echoing The Searchers and John Wayne in the doorframe, even though Tarantino hates John Ford.
The doorframe says that Jews in Europe in the early 40s were always outsiders on the run, and frames a movie poster for what unfolds as she runs toward her cinema in Operation Kino; it is impossible to overrate what it meant that the film really speaks the languages of the time and place, with an actor who could act in French, German, English and Italian.
Landa asking to switch to English so the family under the floorboards would not understand was his plan all along; Waltz can be taken for granted now because he repeats the trick, but the modulation when he asks 'You're sheltering enemies of the state, are you not?' and drops the gregarious affectation reveals the heavy of the movie, the big bad rather than Hitler, in one of the most memorable introductions of an actor and a character.
The scene is simultaneously compelling and horrifying: the gregarious guest asking for a glass of milk and lighting his pipe, then the instant pivot into an incarnation of horror; the pan down to the Dreyfus family hiding below and back up to their eyes, people the audience just met whose stakes are instantly understood; then 'Au revoir Shoshana' and the 'boop' with the gun, suggesting that for Landa the pursuit is as gratifying as the catch and that her escape only entices him more.
Landa changes across the movie's three or four years: in 1941 he is a cookie full of arsenic, sweet outside and evil inside, proud of the Jew Hunter nickname, but by his talk with Aldo he claims to be an honorable man who does not control nicknames. One reading is that he is just saying what seals the deal rather than showing a change of conscience; another is that he has to stay elusive to keep an advantage, overpowering with Lepedit (as transcribed) and negotiating with Aldo while still in charge, which also shows the bureaucratic and clerical tyranny of the Germans, with the carrot that they would not harass the family anymore.
The Mike Myers scene is loved as a work of imagination: Rod Taylor coming out of retirement to play Winston Churchill, Myers as a military attache, the scotch in the globe, Fassbender talking about Pabst, Selznick and Louis B. Mayer, and the 'Down with Hitler. All the way down' toast; the last 10 years of Myers' career are called strange, but a star who no longer needs to make Austin Powers 4 can simply spend two days in a Tarantino movie and be part of it forever.
In the strudel lunch, 'wait for the cream' is good advice even though Hans is a monster, and the cigarette put out in the cream is called the biggest on-the-nose metaphor in the movie, the cookie with arsenic again.
Asked by name whether he likes strudel, the host cannot recall ever eating it, assumes it is pretty good, and is not really into a flaky pastry. — Chris Ryan
Melanie Laurent's eyes pop at her first bite of strudel, read as a character who has not had dessert in 10 years because of the life she was forced into; the counter is that she and Marcel could get strudel or the 1940s French Milk Duds at the cinema, but the moment reads as someone who never gets taken to nice lunches while being terrified, with pleasure and pain mixed together.
The quick moment when Hans orders her a glass of milk, as if to say he knows who she is, is one of the most tense in the film and sincerely scary; Laurent and Kruger are revelations up there with Waltz, Kruger previously known mainly as the beauty from Troi (as transcribed), and the earlier part of the sequence is strong too, with Goebbels and Shoshana talking through the French translator while Zoller tries to ingratiate both Goebbels and a woman who wants him dead, a schoolyard romance that is complex yet easy to understand.
The final call is a toss-up between the opening dairy farm sequence and the tavern, but the Hans introduction comes to mind first, so the dairy farm is the pick; the others agree, calling it one of the most searing scenes they have seen, with a last glaze of syrup for 'Teddy fucking ball game'.
Earlier, not wanting to jump ahead to most rewatchable scene, a host notes you could basically say the whole movie.
